AEO: get cited correctly by AI answers.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your brand accurately representable when AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — generate answers about you. It is structural work, not promotional ranking work: the goal is being cited correctly, not being cited more. PRAPI’s approach has three honest parts. The lever is a canonical, machine-readable brand-context file (brief.md) published at a stable URL so engines ingest your source of truth instead of scraping stale pages. The measurement is a free citation tracker that shows which domains AI Overview and ChatGPT cite for any query, plus an opt-in weekly digest that tracks your brand’s citations over time. The discipline is that PRAPI runs pre-registered experiments on its own portfolio to learn what actually moves citation accuracy, rather than guessing. PRAPI makes no traffic, ranking, or recommendation guarantees.
What AEO is — and what it is not
Answer Engine Optimization is making your brand correctly representable when an AI assistant answers a question about you. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview “what does this company do?” or “who are the alternatives to X?”, the engine assembles an answer from whatever it can fetch and trust. AEO is the work of giving it a clean, authoritative source so the answer is right. It is not a ranking lift, a traffic hack, or a way to be mentioned more often. Tools that promise “rank #1 in ChatGPT” or “3x your AI traffic” are selling mechanics the underlying systems do not support. The outcome PRAPI optimizes for is accuracy: that when you are cited, you are cited correctly — right one-liner, right credentials, right positioning, current pricing.
The lever: a canonical brand-context file
The structural fix is publishing a machine-readable brand-context file at a stable URL on your domain, so AI agents ingest your source of truth instead of piecing you together from your homepage, a stale LinkedIn About section, and third-party profiles. PRAPI uses brief.md — plain markdown with structured frontmatter (voice rules, credentials, one-liner, bios, assets, published outlets), an open spec stewarded by The Integrity Framework. Search engines index it; AI assistants with web-fetch can ingest it. Visibility scopes (public / pitch-shareable / private) let you control exactly what an engine sees.
- Generate one free: paste your homepage URL into the brief.md generator and get a starter file in about 90 seconds.
- Host it your way: commit it to your repo at yourcompany.com/brief.md, or let PRAPI host it at a stable URL.
- Keep it portable: the spec is open — your brand context moves with you, not trapped in a vendor database.
Measure where you stand (free)
Before you optimize anything, see who AI engines cite today. The free AEO citation tracker takes any query and returns the domains Google AI Overview and ChatGPT cite for it — the top cited domains per engine, with mention counts and sample URLs. It is backed by the DataForSEO LLM Mentions API, cached for 7 days per query, with budget caps so it stays free. Use it to spot-check the queries that matter to your category and see whether you show up at all.
Track it over time (opt-in weekly digest)
Spot-checks tell you today; tracking tells you the trend. Turn on the weekly AEO digest for a brand and PRAPI emails the brand owner a week-over-week view of that brand’s citations across the AI engines it tracks (Google AI Overview and ChatGPT today) — what changed, which queries moved. It is strictly opt-in per brand, with a self-serve unsubscribe, and it is silent until you turn it on. This is the customer-facing slice of the same scheduled-tracking pipeline PRAPI runs internally.
Why trust PRAPI on AEO
AEO is young enough that most advice is folklore. PRAPI treats it as an empirical question. We run a pre-registered AEO experiment across our own portfolio of brands — hypotheses and analysis plan locked before data collection, citation snapshots gathered on a schedule, confounders logged, an automated kill-switch if a change hurts citation rate. The point is to learn what actually moves citation accuracy and feed that back into how brief.md and the product work, rather than shipping vibes. The methodology is public; the findings inform the product you use.
That experiment runs on PRAPI’s own brands — it is how we learn, not a dashboard we resell. What you get is the lever (brief.md), the measurement (tracker + digest), and a team that measures this rigorously.
What we do not promise
No traffic guarantees, no ranking guarantees, no “we’ll get you recommended” claims. AI engines decide what they cite; no one controls that, and anyone who says they do is guessing. PRAPI’s job is to remove the structural reasons you get cited wrong — no source of truth, stale scraped data, no machine-readable context — and to show you, honestly, where you currently stand. The public tooling covers Google AI Overview and ChatGPT today; coverage expands as the data sources do.
FAQ
What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?
The practice of making your brand accurately representable when AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — answer questions about you. It is structural work (give engines a clean source of truth), not promotional ranking work.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO optimizes where your pages rank in a list of blue links. AEO optimizes whether AI-generated answers represent you correctly when they synthesize a response. SEO is about positions; AEO is about accuracy of citation. They overlap but are not the same job.
How does PRAPI help with AEO?
Three ways: brief.md gives AI engines a canonical, machine-readable source of truth for your brand; the free citation tracker shows who AI Overview and ChatGPT cite for any query; and an opt-in weekly digest tracks your brand’s citations over time. PRAPI also runs pre-registered experiments on its own brands to learn what actually moves citation accuracy.
Does PRAPI guarantee more AI citations or more traffic?
No. The outcome we optimize for is being cited correctly, not being cited more. AI engines decide what they cite and no tool controls that. We remove the structural reasons you get cited wrong and show you honestly where you stand.
How do I check who AI engines cite for my topic?
Use the free AEO citation tracker at prapi.dev/tools/aeo-citation-tracker. Type a query and it returns the domains Google AI Overview and ChatGPT cite, with mention counts and sample URLs. Results are cached 7 days per query.
Can I track my brand’s AI citations over time?
Yes. Turn on the weekly AEO digest for a brand and PRAPI emails the brand owner a week-over-week view of that brand’s citations across the engines it tracks (Google AI Overview and ChatGPT today). It is opt-in per brand, with a self-serve unsubscribe.
Which AI engines does PRAPI track?
The public tooling and weekly digest cover Google AI Overview and ChatGPT today, via the DataForSEO LLM Mentions API. Coverage expands as the underlying data sources add engines. We do not claim Perplexity or Claude coverage in the public tooling.
Do I need brief.md to do AEO with PRAPI?
It is the lever, so it is strongly recommended — a canonical brand-context file is the structural fix AEO depends on. You can still use the free citation tracker to measure where you stand without one.
Get cited correctly. Start with the file and the measurement.
Generate a brief.md in 90 seconds, then check who AI engines cite for your category with the free citation tracker. Both free, no card.